The new issue of Scientific American has a neat article on The Neuroscience of Music, which summarizes some of the recent studies regarding how the brain processes music. In particular, I'm into the emotional response to music; I have a lot of analytical mental processes that run constantly in my head, which tends to de-emotionalize a lot of my responses to external stimuli. However, well-crafted and emotive music rises above the intellectual static and puts me into a profoundly different mood. So next time you're talking to me and I'm making too much sense, stick an iPod in my ear and initiate a logic override.
Most people will find this article a bit dry (Scientific American is the kind of magazine that never seems to have enough gravy). For you hedonists out there, here's the juiciest excerpt:
[...] Blood and Zatorre added a further clue to how music evokes pleasure. When they scanned the brains of musicians who had chills of euphoria when listening to music, they found that music activated some of the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs.
Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll...cognitively, it's all the same :-)
Spied via BoingBoing
Jeff over at Scintus forwarded me this FastCompany article about the most innovative company in America. Is it Apple, with their amazing string of products? Pixar? IBM? Nope! It's W.L. Gore & Associates, the company that makes GoreTex:
Gore is a strikingly contradictory company: a place where nerds can be mavericks; a place that's impatient with the standard way of working, but more than patient with nurturing ideas and giving them time to flourish; a place that's humble in its origins, yet ravenous for breakthrough ideas and, ultimately, growth.
It's an interesting article...thanks Jeff!
From Arts & Letters Daily: The article Delving Into Democracy's Shadow explores the books of Michael Mann, a sociology professor at UCLA. He's the author of The Sources of Social Power, a yet-unfinished set of books that "chart the emergence of four distinct forms of power (ideological, military, economic, and political)".
In his forthcoming book The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, he speculates that democracy can harbor the seeds of genocide (sadly, there is an entire field of study called "comparative genocide"). As Chronicle restates it:
The problem, says Mr. Mann, comes from a fateful ambiguity at the heart of democracy -- "rule by the people," as the Greek source of the term has it. But within a nation-state, "the people" tends not to mean simply "the ordinary citizens," but those sharing a distinct culture -- an "ethnos." In a nation-state that is authoritarian but stable, ethnic violence may be routine, but it tends not to involve struggle for control of political power.
With democratization, however, the stakes increase. Ethnic nationalism proves strongest, and most deadly, when one group feels economically exploited or threatened by another. (In Rwanda, for example, Tutsis tended to be more prosperous than the Hutus.) Mr. Mann lists a series of steps through which the tensions may reach a brink -- at which point, in the name of democracy, ordinary people seek to purify the nation-state of any ethnic "contamination."
Oh, go and read the rest of the article!
